iCloud and your devices
Find out how iCloud Drive works on your Mac, iPhone and iPad
Sierra
One of the least appealing aspects of cloud-based storage and syncing services on the Mac has been their tendency to require some kind of special folder. Whether you’re using the likes of Dropbox or Google Drive, you have to alter where you save your files by default, to make them accessible on all your devices. Apple’s system with iCloud Drive still uses a particular dedicated folder (named “iCloud Drive” unsurprisingly), but its thinking is to have the process cause the least amount of impact on your existing habits.
Apple’s at its most audacious here with Sierra’s single-click moving of the Desktop and Documents folders to become sub-folders
within iCloud Drive (without affecting how you use these two folders normally), which we explore on p26. Elsewhere, apps increasingly have the capability to save documents to their own dedicated folder in iCloud Drive, which can be immediately accessed in the app’s iOS version, should it be fully compatible with the Mac version’s files. The trick is to have apps save to the iCloud Drive folder by default, rather than you having to manually select it. Pages, Keynote and Numbers work like this, for example. GarageBand, however, does not, because the Mac version is more advanced than the one you get on iPhone and iPad (though files created on an iPhone or iPad can be transferred to Mac).
These folders are all readily accessible in Finder, too – click the iCloud Drive icon in the Finder sidebar; if it isn’t visible, go to Finder > Preferences, click the Sidebar tab, and ensure iCloud Drive is ticked in the iCloud group.
Note that should you later move a file from iCloud Drive to a folder on your Mac’s local storage, an alert will interrupt the action. For example, drag something from TextEdit’s iCloud Drive folder to your Downloads folder and you’ll be prompted to confirm that you’re sure, and stating the item will be “deleted from iCloud Drive and your other iCloud devices.” However, should you choose to delete a file that’s located in iCloud Drive simply by sending it to the Trash, you get no such warning. iOS
Although there’s variation in how Mac apps handle file management, differences are much more overt on iOS, which can have a substantial effect on how you interact with iCloud Drive. In the early days of iOS, it was common for apps to save documents in their own dedicated folders. As far as you would see, your documents were being saved “inside” the apps. So, if you want to open a Pages document, you would open Pages first, then the document; contrast this with the Mac, where you can use Finder to locate a document and then double-click it to open an app, or use an Open dialog within an app to navigate the entire file system, rather than one app-specific folder.
In many cases, this is still how iOS works. Plenty of apps haven’t moved on at all – you still only get access to files housed in the app’s dedicated folder. Others, such as Apple’s iWork apps, give you access to such a folder as the default for saving work, but add further options. Using the Share icon, you can move a file to a new location within the iCloud Drive folder, or tap Locations to gain access to alternative locations (which you can use to get items from remote servers using the likes of Panic’s Transmit) or iCloud Drive’s document picker, which enables you to create
new folders in iCloud Drive beyond just the default app folders, as well as select where you want to save your file.
The last of those things is also accessible in the iCloud Drive app. If you don’t see its icon on the Home screen or in Spotlight, search for iCloud Drive on the App Store to access it on your device. (In iOS 9, the app is instead added by going to Settings > iCloud > iCloud Drive and turning on “Show on Home Screen.”) If you remove the app, it won’t affect your documents in iCloud Drive – it just acts as a way for you to view, open, and even rearrange the documents stored there. Just tap a folder to view its contents, and tap a file to open it in an appropriate app, if iOS recognizes that it has one (this works with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote files, for example). If you want to open a file with an other than the default, tap and hold your finger on it, and choose the Share option, then select the appropriate app.
Files without recognized apps will open with a preview if they’re in a format which iOS can read, or otherwise just a view of the file type. You can tap the Share button to select an app in which to open the file. You can also delete the file using the trash can symbol, or move them using the Folder symbol. You can also access the Move option by tapping and holding on a file.
If you want to move or delete more than one file at a time, tap Select at the top, tap all the files you want to affect (which adds a check mark), then tap New Folder, Move, or Delete at the bottom, depending on what you want to do with the files. Deleted files can be recovered, but not from the iOS app or Finder – see p30.